Cagatay Turkay has been awarded a prestigious grant by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under their First-Grant scheme. The funding is for the project titled “NlViS: Natural Language Interaction for Visual Data Analysis” that will commence September 2017 for a duration of 18 months until February 2019.

The project will investigate ways to advance exploratory data analysis methodologies through novel combinations of interactive visualisations and natural language understanding. The project will be asking fundamental questions on how analysts make inferences from visual representations to develop an in-depth understanding of how exploratory visual data analysis processes are executed. Further details of the project can be found on the project page.

Jason Dykes has co-authored a piece on the role of visualization in developing policy from scientific findings with Owen Gaffney of the Future Earth Media Lab, Greg McInerny of the University of Warwick, Denise Young of the International Council For Science and Marian Dörk of Potsdam University of Applied Sciences.

The article presents arguments for increasing communication between scientists policy makers and designers and supporting mechanisms both for achieving this and developing visual literacy. It contains links to some interesting visualization examples.